Westbrook: County remembers formation of the New Deal school

At the time, it was just a consolidation of schools. But 75 years later, the event is being commemorated as a milestone of history in Lubbock County.

When the New Deal ex-students meet for their 75th anniversary reunion Sept. 10-11, there will be vestiges of Grovesville, Caldwell, Center and the school that used to be called Monroe.

New Deal is the name that came out of the consolidation of the four schools in 1935, though some thought an emerging first-class school shouldn’t be named after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s national economic experiment. Still, it received more votes than North Four, North Star, and Norfleet, according to Rodney Goebel, a former student and historian. The original name of Monroe wasn’t even a serious contender.

Mitchell Phillips, who had only known the school as Monroe, recalls there were additional students coming after the consolidation, but he didn’t think much of it at the time.

“I was in track and field, and I had a brother who was a star. He could run 100 yards in 10 seconds.”

Phillips said he finished the 10th grade and then went into military service.

Jack Dulaney’s father, Cecil Dulaney, had moved to Lubbock in about 1920, and taught school for a year at Grovesville, then got a position in a variety of coaching, teaching and administrative jobs at Monroe.

During that year, Dulaney’s parents had living quarters in the Monroe gym.

His wife, Dorene, said the facility was a kind of combination gym and auditorium with a stage at one end of it.

Dulaney said of his parents’ accommodations, “They had a stage, a dressing room on one side, and one room on the other side. They cooked and ate on one side, and slept on the other side in the dressing room.

“He only taught there one year. They started issuing vouchers — the state ran out of money, as I understand it, and they started giving them vouchers for pay checks. So, at the end of the term, my granddad offered him some land to farm.”

Caldwell School had encountered difficulties during its abbreviated tenure. It was about 12 miles north and two miles west of Lubbock, according to a 1936 Lubbock County Yearbook published by the Lubbock County Teachers Association. Its first one-room building was sold several years prior to the consolidation, and an entire school term was taught in a tent when another building couldn’t be procured. Then the brick building that eventually replaced it burned in 1934, and the remainder of the school year was conducted in a near-by house. Its replacement building was completed just in time for the consolidation to begin.

Center, which was about three miles east of the present Interstate 27 in north Lubbock County, was the school that Goebel was attending before consolidation.

“My dad was trustee part of that time, and he realized — and often said — that the school district was an odd shape. Where we were in the far reaches of the Center community was a long way to New Deal. And yet some parts of the Lubbock schools were closer to New Deal than we were. It was because the school district was so odd shaped.”

Grovesville, in particular, went lead-footed into the consolidation. It was four miles east of Shallowater on the present-day FM 1294. There were parents and students there who preferred to keep their own school.

Louis McMenamy was living just a quarter of a mile from Grovesville and had started first grade there. It was no problem to walk to school in good weather.

“We had two teachers who stayed with us at Grovesville back in the 1930s. I was just a little kid when they were there. I imagine they walked there, too,” he said.

According to Goebel, the consolidation of schools didn’t take place at once.

“It was just the high schools, and the other schools then went from the first to the sixth grades,” he said. “We bused just the high school people in.

“People in the communities were so loyal to their little schools that they didn’t want to give them up. But the tendency was to combine them all. So, the sixth grade moved up to high school. Then the time finally came when all of the grades were going to Monroe.”

Dulaney remembers he started out at Grovesville.

“We lived only 3½ miles from Shallowater,” he said. “So, when they consolidated the school, I went to Shallowater. Then, they came and got us and said we had to go to New Deal. I went there one year, and then transferred — my brother and I — back over here.”

His father had gathered signatures on a petition asking for Shallowater to take the Groves School District, and Grover Gillett had done the same at Caldwell. But Shallowater had just finished a new school and didn’t want to expand.

Dorene Dulaney remembers attending New Deal from first grade to the middle of sixth grade, then her family moved to the Lubbock area.

She remembers as highlights of New Deal not only the rhythm band, but school plays.

“They had neat costumes,” she said. “In one play, I was a Quaker girl, and Mother made me a long, gray dress with a pink bonnet. I remember my brother was an Indian and I was a pilgrim. About five or six years ago, he sent me a birthday card — he had copied a picture from that on the front of the card by computer.”

The members of Patti Jones’ family have been anchored in the New Deal school system for three generations. Her father, Macon James, graduated in 1937, and her mother, Hazel, graduated in 1942.

“They married before Mother graduated from high school,” she said. “He drove the bus to and from school, but he took it home every evening to where they lived. And Mother still played basketball until she graduated from high school.

“My brother graduated in 1961, then my husband graduated in 1971, I graduated in 1972, and our two sons graduated in 1993 and 1999.”

The family embraced all the programs that were available.

“In a small school like that, you pretty much did everything,” she said. “Students did sports, one-act plays, football, basketball, FFA, FHA — the whole nine yards.”

Suzanne Fortenberry Hamilton, who is handling much of the planning for the reunion, started at New Deal in first grade.

“My best memory is that New Deal had one long hall. You started on the south end in the first grade and finished on the north end in high school. It was neat to walk down the hall and see all the grades.”

Students from classes 1965 and earlier were able to go throughout their entire time in school by progressing along the hall from first to 12th grades. Hamilton, however, of the class of 1969, had to enter a new building when she was a sophomore.

McMenamy, who still has vivid memories of the Grovesville School, said his father purchased the old building after all the students moved away.

“After they stopped using it, my dad bought it from the school district for $500.”

McMenamy saved the cornerstone of the structure as a souvenir.

He attended New Deal until his sophomore year, when his family moved to Oklahoma, and he finished school in Waurika.

His experience in New Deal apparently was good, and he remembers in particular A.L. Faubion as superintendent.

“He stayed there until about 1951. He hired my wife, LaVerna, sight unseen to be second-grade teacher.”

Goebel remembers Faubion positively, also.

“He made the thing happen. He taught classes in addition to being superintendent. He would get called out of class, and then he would let us do the class on our own.”

For some reason, the Grovesville School, built on an almost six-acre tract beside Farm Road 1294, seems to hold a mysterious attraction for those associated closely with New Deal.

Dorene Dulaney said, “It’s on the north side of the road, and it was just a grass patch for years. But in the last two or three years, someone bought it and built a beautiful home there.”

The buyer of the Grovesville school site was Jimmy Noland.

“It was vacant, and I considered it kind of humbling when I got that,” he said. “They told me the school had been there ... all the kids who played there, all the dreams, the challenges ... there are still pieces of brick and mortar in a certain place there on the property.”

Noland has been a part of the New Deal school system for more than 30 years. He is its superintendent.

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Ray Westbrook's column is probably the second best column in the A-J (behind Berle, of course). I loved the New Deal story. My late aunt Elaine Klug went to school in New Deal and I think she graduated in or around 1963. She attended classes in the old building with the long, wide hall with 1st-12th grades that was mentioned in this story. Aunt Elaine would go on to teach for nearly 30 years and raise two children.